22 February 1999: Napping

During RDC's and my walk yesterday, we saw our first robin of the year. It's February, and so what if late February--can I enjoy this robin or must I be worried about global warming? We were a stretch away from it, on the other side of the dry canal, when I spotted it. Could it be a flicker? Certainly that would be more probable, but its colors were off. It was a robin. It's spring.

Later this week it's supposed to be in the high 60s, good for moving. No rain, of course: this is Denver. Also good for moving. The forecast calls for snow again on Sunday, when it's almost March, the wettest month of the year here: It's spring.

We met a pair of dogs, a black mostly-lab named Tillie and another mutt, which looked part Rhodesian ridgeback, Bridger. I didn't ask how the dogs got their names. About Tillie I wasn't so curious; that was a name our mother always called CLH and me whenever we overstepped her bounds. But Bridger: why? It made me think of Fiver, who loved to cross bridges.

Saturday we accomplished some dread Errands. We reserved a truck and two handtrucks for next Saturday, fetched boxes from the package store, brought some stuff to Goodwill, retrieved my old box from RDC's old office, and lugged the speakers in for repair.

The speakers are four years old Kef speakers with a five-year warranty. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it, five years? That system was the biggest expense of the wedding, but it's lasted. RRP and I were out shopping one day, maybe for my shoes,and RDC had gone out questing for components. I wondered what I would come home to. As RRP and I approached the house, RDC opened the door and waved. "He bought something," I told RRP. He was grinning and bouncing. "He bought a lot," observed RRP.

Yep.

Anyway, we have the Mac speakers for now, and my old box. Blake can listen to the radio this week and then this weekend probably someone helping us has a box so we can have music in both places.

A "package" store seems to be solely a New English regionalism. You shouldn't drink liquor at all, and if you do, you should disguise it probably in a plain brown paper package so no one sees you bring it home. Love that Puritanism.

All I could think about boxes from the liquor store was that they'd stink. There's a smell of rotten alcohol from broken bottles in a liquor store that I hate. I didn't think of one advantage: they have those cardboard dividers. So I packed presents from my shower: the sherbet glasses DEW gave me and milkshake glasses RRP gave me and champagne flutes from RDC's aunt.

(The potential stink wasn't my only objection. When we moved here we had 50 crates--startlingly like those milkcrates people obtain illegally-- and 70 10-ream copy boxes. Maybe two legal-sized copy boxes but the rest letter. Made for easy packing of the truck for all the boxes to be symmetrical. So I had my issues about the boxes not being all the same size, but I realize I'm being stupid about that and that's why this bit's in parentheses.)

As I told everyone at the shower, I didn't know what they would drink their champagne out of, but RDC and I were going to use these. Everyone else got plastic cups, by the way. We had our two flutes, and APB saw something slightly foamy in my glass and asked, "Is Lisa drinking beer?" but it was sparkling cider.

While doing our errands, we stopped at Jerusalem's for lunch. Within a three-minute walk from DU are Japanese, Mexican, South American, Middle Eastern, and American roadhouse cuisines. It makes me homesick (koff koff) for UConn, which had only American roadhouse cuisine. Plus whatever slop the flaky short-order cooks at Cup-o-Sun threw together. Anyway. Jerusalem's is, obviously, the middle Eastern: falafel, taboulleh, baba gounash (forgive me), hummus, roasted lamb, stuffed grape leaves. We shared a single combination platter and gorged ourselves, which inspired me to a small afternoon nap.

I also packed my desk (except the books) and the bureau. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday I have to do the pantry and the non-clothes items in the hall closet. Thursday we move the clothes, packed or unpacked. Friday we move everything but the books and furniture. It's a plan. The clothes will be a matter of jam stuff in a box, tote over, dump on the closet floors. That will work for my stuff, since I don't believe in ironing.

Sunday I got very little done. We usually walk in the later afternoon but we expected Sunday to cloud over, so we went out and got back around noon. How luxurious that felt, to feel like it was later in the day (because of the walk) and come home to almost the whole afternoon.

Which I wasted. Instead of packing the closets, I took another nap. Like a schmuck I channel-surfed over my lunch, finding the William Hurt version of "Jane Eyre." Neither his nor the other recent adaptation pleases me, but it suited me for lunch. Except that I picked up Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Pride and Prejudice (if need be, to get the Brontë taste out of my head), and dozed and read.

I have never liked Ellen Dean, thinking her a self-serving character (although not as self-serving as Catherine of course) as well as an unreliable narrator. And Alice Fairfax is unsatisfactorily explained: she might not have known who the madwoman was, but did she not guess or suppose or in any way think it a right and proper thing to warn poor Jane? So I looked for contextual evidence there. The only thing that makes Charlotte's a stronger novel than her sisters' is its narrative technique. Jane, as Lucy Snowe does, tells her story at a remove of some years, but it is her own story. Ellen Dean and Gilbert Markham intrude too much upon others' tales. Well. It's the only thing that makes Jane better than Tenant. Almost anything is better than Wuthering Heights. Poor Emily.

Moving report: Everything neither a garment nor a book in the bedroom is in a box. The bathroom, except for daily stuff; the non-book, non-furniture bits of the living room; and some of the kitchen are packed. Tonight I'll do the closets.

Today for lunch I'm torn between going to the library to find new writing books and Elizabeth Gaskell and going to the post office and Kinko's as I ought. I need boxes from Kinko's, if they have any, and I have to post my newest niece's present. I found a darling little pink pig. She's covered in terrycloth, good for drooling and gumming, and she has a squeaker. I guess I'll do my errands like a good girl. I suppose I shouldn't make any more library runs until next week.

(later)

OK, now I'm angry. And you won't like me when I'm angry. I had my present to mail to MCV and a little something to send to CLH and so I went to the post office instead of the library. I dragged A. with me because she would be required to haul back the gobs of boxes I hoped Kinko's would have and we both like PreSSto, the sandwich place in the same lobby as the Kinko's. I mailed off Wilbretta the pig and the tape and we ducked our heads into the wind and headed for Kinko's and Pressto. (I believe the two capitalized SS's are meant to indicate a sizzle or something.)

Kinko's had no boxes, the beasts. Onward to Pressto for aubergine sandwiches and the point of the story. Pressto has a lobby door and an outside door, and during the winter the outside door is kept locked from the outside because, you know, it's winter and cold out. It's just a sandwich place and it's not like there's a massive grill line to warm the employees. It's the kind of place where you order your sandwich and wait till they call your number. So A. and I stood off to the side, near the outside door. This door has a sign on it requesting people to use the lobby door since it's winter and cold out. Mostly people looked at the sign, looked resigned, and headed for the lobby door. This was just lunchtime drama, and we watched their reactions and waited for our sandwiches.

Then one more person neared the restaurant, pulled on one door (the one marked "Please use other door" even in good weather), pulled on the other door (the one with the sign), ignored the sign, saw me through the door, and told me to open the door. I couldn't hear him but I could read his lips, and I just raised my eyebrows and pointed to the sign. "Just open the door," he snarled. I met his eyes once more and turned my back, not in time to escape seeing him flip me the finger as he too turned away.

Ooooo.

Now I was pissed. Who was he to ignore the restaurant's reasonable request, to command me, to expect me to obey him and open a locked door?

A. had her sandwich and I wondered whether mine would be ready before the fuckwit appeared in the other door. "I have to say something to him," I said to A., who agreed. Besides, since I almost always think of the right thing to say several moments later, perhaps the lag between face-to-glass-to-face and actual face-to-face would be enough time for me to construct a response. My sandwich was now ready but where was the fuckwit? We left, by the lobby door, figuring he'd gone somewhere else and that my biting wit would have to be rechanneled. But there he stood in the lobby, fiddling with his watch. "Is that him?" I asked A.. It would be so like me to attack a stranger. It was indeed.

"Excuse me, sir," I tapped him on the arm. "What do you think you are that you can order around a complete stranger and then flip her off when she doesn't obey you?" The "what" instead of "who" was deliberate: I wasn't yet prepared to accept him as human; cf how I think about rabbits, supra.

"Shut up," he elbowed me aside. "Get out of my way."

Okay.

What was the next step, physical confrontation? Maybe. Not my scene, anyway; my tap was as much as I wanted to engage him. I stormed out, through the revolving doors. A. was right behind me, but she didn't storm.

If I were a man pointing to the same sign, he wouldn't've repeated his demand. Unless I were a little piddly short guy. If I were drop-dead gorgeous, he wouldn't've flipped me. I am not a man and I am not gorgeous but I did assert myself as much as I am comfortable doing: should I have followed him into Pressto and said, "Hey don't serve this guy because he doesn't follow the rules?"

If I thought quicker, I might have invented some verbal response to his elbowing: "I can see why you're in a hurry--I saw your toupee blowing away." I suggested this to A. on the way back. "That bald fuckwit." "Fuckwit," culled from Bridget Jones's Diary, being so suitable repeating it doesn't strip it of power (right!).

Resorting to physical insults is as juvenile as his threatening physical intervention, I realize. But I didn't, not to him; I insulted him in ways unrelated to the exchange as a way to diffuse the powerless anger I felt at him.

And now I'm wondering if I tell people this story if they'll think it was my fault for not opening the door to begin with. Was I being a goody two-shoes? If I was being a goody two-shoes, did that justify his imperiousness? Does my confronting him prove that I was being sanctimonious or does it show a promising degree of assertion?

Grrr.

Going into the calm place now. PGN's old biography room: a door on one short end, two large windows on the left wall, shelves over cupboards on the other two walls and in the corners. The open door pushed against the corner shelf and I could sit on the cupboard, behind the door, and secrete myself against the shelves, legs drawn up, lights off, with enough natural light that the absence of electrical light didn't look suspect from the stacks.

That's my private calm place, public but not visible. Usually solitary but not for an agoraphobic mood (not that I suffer from that) are anywhere in my lake and anywhere along the beach and particularly all the way at Griswold Point.

I was curious. Were you?

"It comes from the title of a rather twee and moralistic nursery tale called The History of Goody Two-Shoes, which is thought to have been written by Oliver Goldsmith, and which was published in 1765 by John Newbery, one of the earliest London publishers of children's stories. Goody owned only one shoe. When she was given a pair of them, she was so pleased that she showed them to everybody, saying "Two shoes". The phrase now refers to a self-righteous, smugly virtuous person."

This definition gets points for using the word "twee" which in my opinion is underused in American English.